Note 29 — Chapter I · GREEK RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

Homer certainly knows of no general worship of the dead. But the accessibility of the dead by means of certain rites is attested not only by the Νέκυια (Od. x. 517-520), but by the slaughter of the Trojan captives at the funeral of Patroclus (Il. xxiii. 174). The poet’s own attitude to the latter is not so important as his evidence of the custom’s existence.